By: Justin Kander8/19/2014﻿(CUREYOUROWNCANCER.ORG Exclusive)Awareness of the higher level healing effects of cannabis extracts has risen dramatically since the release of Dr. Sanjay Gupta's Weed documentary (shown below). The program was largely focused on the use of cannabis extracts to treat rare forms of epilepsy, including Dravet syndrome, which does not respond to any conventional antiepileptic medications. Charlotte Figi was the main patient examined. Her caregivers the Stanley brothers, and their organization Realm of Caring, were also profiled.Charlotte’s family was encouraged to seek out high-CBD cannabis because nothing else had worked. Paige Figi, Charlotte’s mother, initially purchased the strain R4 and had a friend extract the oil. After the very first dose, Charlotte’s seizures stopped, and this cessation continued for the next seven days. Now over two years since that dose, Charlotte continues to thrive on a high-CBD strain named after her, Charlotte’s Web. However, most children are finding that some amounts of THC or THCA are necessary for full seizure control, as full spectrum cannabis is usually what works best.

The Stanley Brothers

﻿The Stanleys said that research showed CBD could help epilepsy, and that encouraged them to help Charlotte. As it turns out, patients have reported that high-CBD and other cannabis oils work against Dravet syndrome, Doose syndrome, Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, cortical dysplasia, metachromatic leukodystrophy, CDKL5 disorder, idiopathic epilepsy, and more. What’s truly surprising about this situation is how few questions the country has asked regarding this situation, and nobody has made the connection that logically, this medicine should work on much more than epilepsy. Think about it – what are the chances that epilepsy is the only serious condition that extracts work for? Epilepsy was apparently the first thing the Stanley brothers seriously pursued, and it worked. If epilepsy was the only condition that responded in this miraculous way to cannabis therapy, the likelihood of the Stanleys striking gold on the first try is absurdly low. It makes far more sense that many diseases respond in this way, and epilepsy just happens to be one of them.

﻿Scientific studies demonstrate that cannabinoids benefit epilepsy, and thousands of research papers lend support for using cannabinoids to treat other conditions. In fact, the science seems even stronger for diseases like diabetes, inflammation, chronic pain, heart disease, and especially cancer, for which hundreds of studies exist. ﻿

Then there’s Rick Simpson. Back in 2008, he was featured in Christian Laurette’s film “Run From the Cure”, where he stated that cannabis extracts were effective against virtually all diseases. He didn’t know anything about the endocannabinoid system or the myriad of studies showing how cannabinoids work, but made his claims based on experience. If you asked him back then if cannabis oil could treat Dravet syndrome, he would’ve said yes. Any reasonable person would have laughed at this and called Rick an idiot, saying that absolutely no pharmaceuticals work against Dravet and we don’t even understand how the disorder functions, so how could cannabis be effective? Yet all these years later, Rick’s claims are being proved true by people across the world. Logically, it reasons that he was telling the truth, or else his claims would not have panned out as they did.

Between the golden “luck” of the Stanleys and the predictive power of Rick Simpson, it is clear that cannabis extracts really do work. However, there’s still so much to learn, like what cannabinoid/terpenoid profiles work best against which diseases in which patient groups. The success rate in the absence of such research is remarkably high, a testament to the versatility and fundamental nature of cannabis medicine. But to help people most efficiently, and those who haven’t responded to traditional cannabis extract therapy, we desperately need more research.